How well do you think London's voters understand the complexities of the electoral system, with which they will be faced for the first time in the London Mayor and Assembly elections next month?
Earlier this week Peter Kellner in his column in the London Evening Standard strongly criticised two aspects of BBC coverage of the London Mayor and other local elections to be held next month. First, he complained that the BBC's political journalists in London, who had commissioned a poll on the election from MORI [BBC London Live poll] had been prevented by Corporation policy from including any questions on voting intention; this is merely the continuation of a policy which we have criticised for a number of years. Secondly, he has pointed out a new restriction, which will lead to all the parties being required to run their election broadcasts before Easter, a full ten days before polling day. This, arises from the introduction of pilot schemes in a number of councils across the country, whereby a few polling stations will be open early, on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday before the normal polling day, so that electors who cannot vote in the usual way will be able to cast thei...
What is "Britishness"? Is there some common national identity that all of us, or most of us, in these islands share? And are there common characteristics which we tend to assume other Britons are likely to have? The question poses itself in the week in which Tony Blair and William Hague, in their own ways, tried to make political capital by appealing to British voters' instincts of national identity.
If the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, had time to glance at the Guardian on the morning of Budget Day, perhaps as he ate the frugal breakfast the price of which he apparently had to borrow from a colleague, it might just have raised a smile. For there, in ICM's poll, the mass of the public were saying they wanted him to do very much what he was proposing to announce that he would do. Most of them wanted him to use any spare cash to help the Health Service, and more than half thought a rise in duty on tobacco was the most acceptable tax.
So, the Conservatives have comfortably gained Ayr from Labour in the first by-election to the Scottish Parliament
(as the polls suggested they would! - ICM/Scotsman poll, Scottish Opinion/Daily Record poll), with Labour convincingly beaten into third by the Scottish National Party, and their Liberal Democrat coalition partners slipping to fifth behind the Scottish Socialist Party. What, if anything, are the wider implications for Labour, and for the Tories?
"POLL SHOCK: VOTERS TO GIVE DEWAR A BLOODY NOSE. LABOUR FACE AYR CRASH - EXCLUSIVE BY RON MACKENNA" screams the front page of yesterday's Daily Record, Scotland's highest circulation daily newspaper. It certainly shocked me - but it was the accuracy of the reporting, not the data in the poll (a constituency poll by Scottish Opinion Limited ahead of next week's Ayr by-election) that was disturbing.
The Labour Party (or, to be precise, the Labour Representation Committee as it then was) was founded a hundred years ago this week. The driving force behind the LRC's foundation was the trade union movement, with the intention of getting working men into Parliament, and thereby better to represent working class voters.
In ten weeks' time, in theory, Londoners should be voting for their first directly-elected mayor. Even that is uncertain: because the House of Lords has blocked the passage of the regulations that will govern the contest, there is even the possibility that it may have to be postponed altogether. If so, it would be a final indignity in keeping with the shambles which has pervaded all aspects of the proceedings up to now.
The Daily Telegraph's lead editorial on 14 February, argued on the basis of recent Conservative successes in local government by-elections that the Conservatives are in a much stronger position than current opinion polls suggest.
